You know who's awesome at Excel? Martin Shkreli. You know, the Wall Street asshole who's in jail now? A while back, someone told me "hey, dude, there are these videos on YouTube where Martin Shkreli uses Excel, and they're fucking magic. It's like the first time you watched someone who's really good at Vim. "
It's true: [0]. Say what you will about that little heartless douchebag, he's fucking awesome at using Excel.
Does being good at excel mean that one knows the shortcuts of navigation? The video indeed showed that Martin knew his ALT+, CTRL+ etc., but is that what differentiates an excel pro from a newbie? I thought that 'knowing' excel goes much deeper than the navigational shortcuts: solver, array formulas, powerpivot, vba etc. etc. - this is what I'd call more sophisticated excel features. If someone clicks the number format dialog or hits ctrl+! and then goes from there, surely shows if someone uses excel every day but not if he 'knows' excel.
Steal money from poor people? No problem, just a small fine. Steal money from rich people? Off to jail you go. I'm not saying that what Martin Shkreli did was right, i.e. he did not go to jail for raising the prices on medicine (for which he had good reasons). He went to jail for lying to investors in a sort of Ponzi scheme using new investments to pay off old debts.
>>You know, the Wall Street ... who's in jail now?
He is a seriously misunderstood figure. Have watched his YouTube videos too, not just the investment class but also his working sessions. Sure his excel skills are legendary.
But I learned a lot from him about skills, learning and mastery. Merely watching him work not only motivated me. But gave me tremendous perspective on time, its utility to life and how skills and knowledge need to work in general.
This guy has legendary skills in investing world. But apart from that he was always reading a book or two. He was doing organic chemistry, chess, playing guitar, learning programming and interests in wide variety of topics in economics.
He was first genuine example of 10k hour practice I have watched live in practice.
You also get to look into the mind of this guy, and see what's at the core of it, and you see most is basically 'knowledge and practice'.
One powerful use of Excel is through Apache POI. Replace VB with the language of your choice, run all your logic and tests in that language, and spit out a spreadsheet at the end of it, all neatly formatted for your end users.
It's a long video is there a specific point where the magic happens? I skipped around and all I saw was him copying and pasting and setting up basic algebra formulas.
Say what you will about that little heartless douchebag
There's no reason to couch your comment like this. He's not a heartless douchebag, and the claims of him causing medicine shortages were greatly exaggerated.
Please watch your language. And like most things, shrekli wasn't as evil as the media paints him out to be and equally, he wasn't as great as his supporters think he is.
There are plenty of people whp are great at excel but you chose to talk about him. Don't give that guy any more attention. Thats what he wants. Lets all just forget about him and go on with our lives.
If we're sharing awesome excel videos, You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky has to be among the best I've ever seen. Joel, being on the team that made excel, has an incredible amount of excel knowledge.
Shameless plug - we actually founded a service [1] that provides Excel experts on-demand, within 30 to 60 seconds. So if you're tired of being the "Excel expert" at work feel free to pass them on to us. Also happy to answer any questions.
Tidbit: Most popular questions tend to be formulas, vlookups, conditional formatting, pivots.
People say "use a real database", fine, but where is the visual data entry? Where are the easy adhoc reports? Where are the forms? I guess if you're on Windows you can use Microsoft Access, but that's the only accesible tool I know of that doesn't require a team of programmers or an enterprise license for some Oracle/SAP type monstrosity.
As bad (and deserved) as their reputation is for helping well-meaning users to create a big mess, spreadsheet software provides an incredibly intuitive UI to put in front of users that have the domain knowledge but not necessarily direct software engineering knowledge.
I've been thinking about this for years, ever since I first read "A Small Matter of Programming" by Bonnie Nardi: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/small-matter-programming where she explored the history of end-user programming systems, and concludes that spreadsheet and CAD software are the only examples that have had widespread and undeniable success.
ASMOP was published in 1993 and I think it is still just as relevant today.
Just as it's possible to write a terribly-architected and designed program in any language, I suspect that with the right engineering effort and insight, modern software engineering practices could bring the complexity under control.
We shouldn't expect to just take spreadsheets and stick them into production, just as you wouldn't take a hastily-written prototype written in any programming language and do the same.
I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people. Enabling people to learn more about the software they use every day is better for everyone involved. Yes, some problems are too complex to solve in a few minutes, but pointing someone in the right direction requires little to no effort.
Excel lacks the community programmers have and also lacks the learning opportunities given by open-source software. A lot of people struggle to find answers specifically because of this lack of community around using Excel as a tool. I know I personally have floundered learning things that would have been simple to understand had there been someone to guide me, so I try to provide that same support to other people when they face the same obstacles.
Yes, its fun to cringe at people's inexperience. It is also important to recognize we all started there.
I suck at excel, but confession: i know how to make Installer programs and I don't tell anyone anything about them, EVER. I learned how to make MSIs packages and NSIS installers about 15 years ago and it didn't stop until I completely redacted the info and experience and changed jobs.
I'm "the excel guy" for a lab of about 100 people, and it is indeed a challenge sometimes. Mostly I just yell at them and tell them to stop using excel sheets as makeshift databases. Then I yell at them some more and make them switch from formulas (which, being written in reverse Polish, are terrible to debug) over to macros. Then I yell at them for recording macros instead of writing them themselves. Then I just do it for them. It's not a ton of fun, but the money is good and the yelling is cathartic.
> I just yell at them and tell them to stop using excel sheets as makeshift databases.
What do you recommend to them as an alternative for makeshift databases? There could be a nice product opportunity for a lightweight database web app that is like Microsoft Access or a spreadsheet without formulas. Airtable probably fits that bill, but even it might be more complicated than many people need.
There needs to be an Excel "pro mode" where the mouse is disabled and you have to do all navigation by keyboard. People would become so much more efficient that way.
the best i've seen is a woman who did corporate financial planning and analysis. i could ask a question and she would have a pivot table spit out the answer as i finished the question.
i consider myself a good* (but not great) excel user, but she was amazing!
* having done complex financial modeling incorporating monte carlo simulation for predictive what-if analysis
Joel Spolsky used to be a Program Manager for Excel. He has a great, 1h long video doing an Excel demo a few years ago - here, now YOU can be the Excel guru https://youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
As someone who finds himself called upon to operate in a lot of situations where Microsoft products are called for---I do wish the unix philosophy would have taken hold in business software.
Excel genuinely is very hard to use. As is Word, as is Photoshop/Illustrator, etc. Personally, I find those problems substantially more difficult than ordinary programming. Because you have a substantial fraction of the horsepower of an ordinary programming language, but hidden behind a forest of menus and semi-incomprehensible icons and weird terminology and poor documentation.
At least with word processing we have the capacity to strip it down to something resembling the unix philosophy, thanks to toolchains like markdown + pandoc. But for spreadsheets, what is there that's lighter than excel?
The widespread use of the Excel grid layout may explain why people seem to have a high tolerance for improperly-sized UIs.
Personally it drives me crazy to see things truncated all over the place, peppered with useless empty cells, for no reason other than “somebody shoehorned this sparse data into a grid and never looked back”. It’s like people just don’t see how much time they’re wasting constantly doing a mental reconstruction of their poorly-described data because they can’t SEE most of it.
Shameless plug, I'm an AI researcher at Talla (talla.com). This is a problem space we're fascinated by. We want to make it easier to allow users to ask natural language questions about data in Excel, Sheets, pdf tables or really any tabular source.
What kind of questions and queries are difficult for you to do in Excel and require an "excel wizard"? Also my email is my profile, would love to hear about challenges folks face.
I've always said that if I ever do one thing with my child, I'll make sure they understand how to use VLOOKUP in excel. If I do that, I'm pretty sure they'll be set for life.
Every office I've worked in those that can perform VLOOKUP's correctly become the Wizards of the office.
[+] [-] OskarS|7 years ago|reply
It's true: [0]. Say what you will about that little heartless douchebag, he's fucking awesome at using Excel.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw
[+] [-] Bishonen88|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rainymood|7 years ago|reply
Steal money from poor people? No problem, just a small fine. Steal money from rich people? Off to jail you go. I'm not saying that what Martin Shkreli did was right, i.e. he did not go to jail for raising the prices on medicine (for which he had good reasons). He went to jail for lying to investors in a sort of Ponzi scheme using new investments to pay off old debts.
[+] [-] kamaal|7 years ago|reply
He is a seriously misunderstood figure. Have watched his YouTube videos too, not just the investment class but also his working sessions. Sure his excel skills are legendary.
But I learned a lot from him about skills, learning and mastery. Merely watching him work not only motivated me. But gave me tremendous perspective on time, its utility to life and how skills and knowledge need to work in general.
This guy has legendary skills in investing world. But apart from that he was always reading a book or two. He was doing organic chemistry, chess, playing guitar, learning programming and interests in wide variety of topics in economics.
He was first genuine example of 10k hour practice I have watched live in practice.
You also get to look into the mind of this guy, and see what's at the core of it, and you see most is basically 'knowledge and practice'.
[+] [-] alecco|7 years ago|reply
He is fast typing but I've seen spreadsheet jockeys do a lot more work much faster. They know all the shortcuts. They know all the obscure functions.
[+] [-] kinleyd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2187|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] incadenza|7 years ago|reply
Real missed opportunity.
[+] [-] xivzgrev|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayesian_horse|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shawn|7 years ago|reply
There's no reason to couch your comment like this. He's not a heartless douchebag, and the claims of him causing medicine shortages were greatly exaggerated.
[+] [-] superioritycplx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1000units|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icantdrive55|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] HyperTalk2|7 years ago|reply
Why not just say X?
[+] [-] joering2|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] liftbigweights|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsheir74|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lozaning|7 years ago|reply
The video is meant to be in the same vein as the You Suck at Photoshop videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
[+] [-] lph|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbenson|7 years ago|reply
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545
[+] [-] riazrizvi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucidguppy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] octo6|7 years ago|reply
Tidbit: Most popular questions tend to be formulas, vlookups, conditional formatting, pivots.
[1] https://www.excelchat.co
[+] [-] guelo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhelmer|7 years ago|reply
I've been thinking about this for years, ever since I first read "A Small Matter of Programming" by Bonnie Nardi: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/small-matter-programming where she explored the history of end-user programming systems, and concludes that spreadsheet and CAD software are the only examples that have had widespread and undeniable success.
ASMOP was published in 1993 and I think it is still just as relevant today.
Just as it's possible to write a terribly-architected and designed program in any language, I suspect that with the right engineering effort and insight, modern software engineering practices could bring the complexity under control.
We shouldn't expect to just take spreadsheets and stick them into production, just as you wouldn't take a hastily-written prototype written in any programming language and do the same.
[+] [-] css|7 years ago|reply
Excel lacks the community programmers have and also lacks the learning opportunities given by open-source software. A lot of people struggle to find answers specifically because of this lack of community around using Excel as a tool. I know I personally have floundered learning things that would have been simple to understand had there been someone to guide me, so I try to provide that same support to other people when they face the same obstacles.
Yes, its fun to cringe at people's inexperience. It is also important to recognize we all started there.
[+] [-] dragonshed|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imhoguy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sk5t|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maybecorrect|7 years ago|reply
Excel is amazing, because it's the wrong tool for everything! Which is really impressive, since there aren't many tools you can do everything with!
I realize it's not a very funny joke, but I do think it's true.
[+] [-] onychomys|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] da_chicken|7 years ago|reply
> Can you help me with VLOOKUP?
Followed shortly by:
> I'm having trouble with a Pivot chart.
[+] [-] cpeterso|7 years ago|reply
What do you recommend to them as an alternative for makeshift databases? There could be a nice product opportunity for a lightweight database web app that is like Microsoft Access or a spreadsheet without formulas. Airtable probably fits that bill, but even it might be more complicated than many people need.
[+] [-] PascLeRasc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crooked-v|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdkhadsj|7 years ago|reply
edit: by real, I mean the main duty of your job / what you were hired for. No implication meant haha
[+] [-] clairity|7 years ago|reply
i consider myself a good* (but not great) excel user, but she was amazing!
* having done complex financial modeling incorporating monte carlo simulation for predictive what-if analysis
[+] [-] drb91|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelvin0|7 years ago|reply
This would have people more 'engaged' at learning the concepts instead of trying to find the 'excel person' and dump their woes onto them.
Excel is great product (I hate it) but so often misused and abused by technically challenged individuals.
[+] [-] csours|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kehrlann|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paultopia|7 years ago|reply
Excel genuinely is very hard to use. As is Word, as is Photoshop/Illustrator, etc. Personally, I find those problems substantially more difficult than ordinary programming. Because you have a substantial fraction of the horsepower of an ordinary programming language, but hidden behind a forest of menus and semi-incomprehensible icons and weird terminology and poor documentation.
At least with word processing we have the capacity to strip it down to something resembling the unix philosophy, thanks to toolchains like markdown + pandoc. But for spreadsheets, what is there that's lighter than excel?
[+] [-] claar|7 years ago|reply
A legion of VLOOKUP gurus manning a helpdesk, only $20 per screen-share!
[+] [-] makecheck|7 years ago|reply
Personally it drives me crazy to see things truncated all over the place, peppered with useless empty cells, for no reason other than “somebody shoehorned this sparse data into a grid and never looked back”. It’s like people just don’t see how much time they’re wasting constantly doing a mental reconstruction of their poorly-described data because they can’t SEE most of it.
We really need better tools.
[+] [-] cde-v|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhairya|7 years ago|reply
What kind of questions and queries are difficult for you to do in Excel and require an "excel wizard"? Also my email is my profile, would love to hear about challenges folks face.
[+] [-] debaserab2|7 years ago|reply
Every office I've worked in those that can perform VLOOKUP's correctly become the Wizards of the office.
[+] [-] neonate|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulcole|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]